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Grocy: web-based, self-hosted grocery and household management

grocy.info

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Re: Grocy: web-based, self-hosted grocery and household management

#31

Post by bradgessler »

jahbrewski wrote: post #4

I love the idea of this, but in reality I can’t imagine the time and energy required to scan and keep everything up-to-date is offset by the benefits. Perhaps a current user can prove me wrong?

I’ve been doing this with https://www.thingybase.com/, my phone, and a wireless Brother label printer or the past few months. Once you get use to a workflow it’s not that bad, and very handy when you are out and about and need to see what’s in your deep freezer or in storage.

Edit: I noticed a few people have signed up and are kicking the tires. Please let me know what you’d like to see built for this thing and give feedback in this thread. At the top of my list is: (1) a phone app, (2) better onboarding (3) more fields for quantity, units, custom, etc. (4) attach photos to items, (5) messaging/chat/threads for each item so people can coordinate better on inventory, (6) one-click to “create a posting to sell an item on Craigslist/etc” for getting rid of a thing and, (7) a way of loaning items to friends and showing them what’s available for loan.

Re: Grocy: web-based, self-hosted grocery and household management

#32

Post by detaro »

bradgessler wrote: post #31
jahbrewski wrote: post #4

I love the idea of this, but in reality I can’t imagine the time and energy required to scan and keep everything up-to-date is offset by the benefits. Perhaps a current user can prove me wrong?

I’ve been doing this with https://www.thingybase.com/ , my phone, and a wireless Brother label printer or the past few months. Once you get use to a workflow it’s not that bad, and very handy when you are out and about and need to see what’s in your deep freezer or in storage. Edit: I noticed a few people have signed up and are kicking the tires. Please let me know what you’d like to see built for this thing and give…

Is there a link with more info about thingybase? Because this takes me immediately to a login prompt, without any details?

Re: Grocy: web-based, self-hosted grocery and household management

#33

Post by johnchristopher »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #12
jahbrewski wrote: post #4

I love the idea of this, but in reality I can’t imagine the time and energy required to scan and keep everything up-to-date is offset by the benefits. Perhaps a current user can prove me wrong?

You've hit exactly the downfall. I've always liked the idea of this sort of thing, but the benefits of using something like this almost never outweigh the costs as compared to just eyeballing the pantry and winging the meal planning on short timescales. The system starts to become the point of the effort rather than just a tool to better achieve household goals. Unless you're dealing with a substantial household or s…

> I've always liked the idea of this sort of thing, but the benefits of using something like this almost never outweigh the costs as compared to just eyeballing the pantry and winging the meal planning on short timescales. The system starts to become the point of the effort rather than just a tool to better achieve household goals.

Sounds a bit like GTD and other systems :/.

Re: Grocy: web-based, self-hosted grocery and household management

#35

Post by jka »

six2seven wrote: post #26

This is exactly what I needed and was thinking about building a similar app. But to be really useful and automated, there's a bit long way I'm afraid. The biggest deal breaker is the time spend for the data entry and updates, leaving a pen-and-paper / notes solution still the most easy to use and just visiting local groceries and shops. I was collecting receipts and playing a bit with scanning of these, but the amoun…

If you were going to tackle the ingredient data-entry problem, what would your preferred system design be?

On the other end of the system, I'm hoping to implement a way to bulk load recipes into grocy, using the open source recipe-scrapers[0] library.

[0] - https://github.com/hhursev/recipe-scrapers

Re: Grocy: web-based, self-hosted grocery and household management

#36

Post by huffmsa »

six2seven wrote: post #26

This is exactly what I needed and was thinking about building a similar app. But to be really useful and automated, there's a bit long way I'm afraid. The biggest deal breaker is the time spend for the data entry and updates, leaving a pen-and-paper / notes solution still the most easy to use and just visiting local groceries and shops. I was collecting receipts and playing a bit with scanning of these, but the amoun…

Sound like you stole my notebook on this subject.

Re: Grocy: web-based, self-hosted grocery and household management

#37

Post by yingw787 »

This looks cool :) Don't want to be a Debbie Downer in a time of crisis but I feel like you could use Google Sheets + IFTTT in order to accomplish much of the same thing. Would be especially useful if you could auto-tie this into grocery delivery services like Instacart.

Re: Grocy: web-based, self-hosted grocery and household management

#39

Post by six2seven »

NamTaf wrote: post #30
six2seven wrote: post #26

This is exactly what I needed and was thinking about building a similar app. But to be really useful and automated, there's a bit long way I'm afraid. The biggest deal breaker is the time spend for the data entry and updates, leaving a pen-and-paper / notes solution still the most easy to use and just visiting local groceries and shops. I was collecting receipts and playing a bit with scanning of these, but the amoun…

Absolutely agree with everything you've said. I had dreamed of a Libib[1] for my kitchen, but knew I would have to do all the painful data adding and it was too much of a bother. The other big challenge I never resolved was how you'd account for e.g. using 1/4 cup of flour out of a bigger volume. Or taken to its extreme, cooking oil. How do you know how much your 'splash' is? You can't predict the remaining volume wi…

> The other big challenge I never resolved was how you'd account for e.g. using 1/4 cup of flour out of a bigger volume. Or taken to its extreme, cooking oil. How do you know how much your 'splash' is? You can't predict the remaining volume without a lot of fiddling to measure it and that defeats the purpose.

Definitely. Or, even, just taking some snacks to another room, and later placing it back to an 'intelligent' cupboard, let's say. In extreme cases, one may need be under a constant tracking at home.

But, simplifying, another option may be to use an improved voice assistant when cooking. One would need then to interact with the VA to note and confirm the stuff used. Improved VA, in essence, would try to 'understand' the activities and interact, instead of being a passive one (as most of currently are), that one needs to say commands. This would require adding it access to camera and maybe other sensors available at 'smart' home. Definitely a lot of interesting and challenging problems to tackle not forgetting too about the user privacy part.

Re: Grocy: web-based, self-hosted grocery and household management

#40

Post by jka »

yingw787 wrote: post #37

This looks cool :) Don't want to be a Debbie Downer in a time of crisis but I feel like you could use Google Sheets + IFTTT in order to accomplish much of the same thing. Would be especially useful if you could auto-tie this into grocery delivery services like Instacart.

I think it'd be possible to build a client which would GET /objects/shoppinglist from the grocy API[0] to retrieve the shopping list items, which currently have the following schema:

  {
    id integer
    product_id integer
    note string
    amount number
    row_created_timestamp string
  }
Do you know if there are clients for Instacart (and/or other food delivery services) available?

[0] - https://demo.grocy.info/api

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